As they walk up through the blossoming pasture toward the barn, the look of things seems changed. As always, the old woman’s talk has alerted them to the presence somewhere of their graves, to the welling up of death and night into the world. The coloring of the day seems to stand tremulously on the surface of a darkness from which neither it nor they will ever go free.
A RESULT
Late Monday morning, August sixth, the president announces that on the day before, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Mat, who was at work in the garden, happened to come to the house with a bucket of tomatoes just as the news came on the radio. And so with Margaret and Hannah and Nettie he hears most of the story, the correct voice of the newsman reciting what there is to tell, standing the event nakedly among them in the room, leaving it there without explanation or comment. Or at least, in the silence after the radio is snapped off, such explanation as was given seems overwhelmed by the event itself.
After he finishes his work in the garden, he hitches his team to the mowing machine and goes until sundown in the unending rounds, cutting the weeds and tree-sprouts that rise against him year after year in the opened fields.
Better than any other work he loves the mowing. He goes through the long afternoon, watching with a kind of ardor the tall growth in its flowing backward fall over the chattering teeth of the cutter bar, the slow uncovering of the shape of the long ridge. It is, as always, one of the heights of his intimacy with the place, and he does not flag in his attentiveness. When the sun has reddened and cooled and come down, throwing deep shadows into the hollows, he turns the team toward the edge of the field, and speaks, stopping them. He throws the machine out of gear and, getting stiffly down, raises the cutter bar and bolts it upright. He takes up the reins again, lifts himself back onto the seat, speaks to the team, and the iron wheels begin to turn in the direction of the barn, soundlessly for the first time in hours, over the cushion of mowed grass.
And through all that time he has been followed by the unfinished knowledge of the bomb and the destroyed city. He has felt his mind borne, like a man in a little boat, on the crest of history, in a violence of pure effect, as though the event of the war, having long ago outdistanced its cause, now escapes comprehension, and speeds on. It has seemed to him that the years of violence have at last arrived at what, without his knowing it, they had been headed for, not by any human reason or motive or wish but by the logic of violence itself. And all the events of the war are at once altered by their result—though he cannot yet tell how or how much.
THE SENSE OF TIME PASSING
The next afternoon Mat and Joe take the two boys and walk back on the ridge to help Jarrat and Burley clean up the barn there in preparation for housing the tobacco crop. They scrape and rake and then sweep the dirt floor, making the place safe for the coke fires that will be used to cure the tobacco—in the process moving and rearranging the tools that have been stored there in the course of the summer’s work, and the troughs and gates and pens that will be used when the sheep are fed and sheltered there during the winter. They work steadily but—since the crops have long been laid by—without hurry. With a sort of conscientiousness they allow the boys to play at the work, knowing that earlier or later in the year such indulgence is not possible. When one of the boys gets in the way, they get him out of it with a patient kindness that becomes one of the pleasures of the afternoon: “Better work over yonder on that side now, old chap.” “Let me get a hold there, honey boy. That’s still a little above your breakfast.”
After one heavy lift Burley sings:
How many biscuits can you eat?
Forty-nine and a ham of meat
This morning.
And does a dusty double shuffle down the driveway that gets the boys so tickled that even Jarrat laughs. And then, as if reluctant to give up the free high spirits of that laughter, Joe shuffles and stomps around his broom handle, singing:
Mamma, Mamma, what a pain I got.
Take me to the pothagate shop.
Get me something, don’t matter what,
So you ease this pain I got.
The afternoon is hot, and they go out now and again to rest at the shady end of the barn and breathe the clean breeze there. They talk and smoke, easing themselves, feeling ahead of them the hurry and strain of the harvest.
“Not many days until we’ll be into it,” Jarrat says at one point. “Be here before we know it.”
And that is the theme of their talk. The sense of time passing. The sense of the future as a reality they will not quite accept until it is upon them.
WHAT IS LEFT
Tired after the hot day, they have been sitting quietly on the front porch since supper, Margaret and Hannah in the swing, Henry in Mat’s lap, Andy on the floor with his back against one of the posts. The katydids have begun their annual life, and in the twilight the sugar maples in the yard are filled with their singing, a harsh foliage.
“What are they saying, Grandad?” Henry asks. He knows, but being a questioner he likes the question.
“Some say Katy did,” Mat says. “Some say Katy didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Some are katydids, and some are katydidnts.”
“What do they care if she did or not?” Andy asks.
“It’s one of the eternal questions. You’re liable to ask it yourself one of these days.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Henry says.
“I do,” Andy says.
“You do not.”
“Andy,” Mat says, “if you go up to one of those trees and lay your hand against it just lightly they’ll hush.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. They will.”
“Is that true?” Hannah asks.
“Try it.”
And so Hannah and the boys leave the porch and go across the yard to one of the larger maples. Andy lays his hand against the trunk, and in the throbbing canopy of the singing there opens a globe of quiet the size of the tree. Andy steps back and stands with Hannah and Henry, looking up. Mat and Margaret sit watching them. For some time, while the katydids in the tree start singing and again Andy lays his hand on the trunk and stops them, nobody speaks. And then Margaret asks:
“What are you thinking about, Mat?”
The question startles him, for he gathers from the tone of her voice that she knows what he is thinking, and asks with daring and with fear.
“Loss,” he says.
Hannah stands with the two little boys, looking up into the darkening tree, holding the boys’ hands in hers, her back to the porch. Maybe because she stands so with the two boys, who wait only for the katydids to sing again, Mat is deeply touched now by the look of her. It seems to him that loss is in the way she stands.
He looks at Margaret, meeting her eyes.
“Loss. It singles us out.”
She is smiling at him, shaking her head. And he realizes that the singleness he is talking about never has belonged to her. She has been without even the comfort of that—not single and whole, but broken. He grows ashamed of his bitterness. He too is broken, as he has been, and has known, all along—that singleness of his an attempt, typical of him, to prescribe terms to the world. The loser prescribes no terms.
“Mat, when we’ve lost it all, we’ve had what we’ve lost.”
“But to lose it. Isn’t there anything in you that rebels against that?”
She looks steadily at him, considering that—whether unsure of her answer or unwilling to answer too readily, he cannot tell. He is aware that Margaret is trying him, drawing deliberately at the bindings between them, as he has tried her with his singleness.
“No,” she says.
“None at all?”
“Virgil,” she says, as if to remind or acknowledge what they are talking about. “From the day he was born I knew he would die. That was how I loved him, partly. I’d brought him into the world that would give him things to love, and take them away. You too, Mat. You
knew it. I knew so well that he would die that, when he did disappear from us the way he did, I was familiar with the pain. I’d had it in me all his life.”
A tone of weeping has come into her voice, though not openly, and Mat does not yet move toward her. The weeping seems only the circumstance of what she is saying, not the result—an old weeping, well known, bearable by an endurance both inborn and long practiced. The dusk is thickening so that their eyes no longer clearly meet, though they still look toward each other.
“But I don’t believe that when his death is subtracted from his life it leaves nothing. Do you, Mat?”
“No,” he says. “I don’t.”
“What it leaves is his life. How could I turn away from it now any more than I could when he was a little child, and not love it and be glad of it, just because death is in it?”
Her words fall on him like water and like light. Suffering and clarified, he feels himself made fit for her by what she asks of him. He shakes his head.
She is clearly asking him now, and he gets up and goes and sits down beside her. He puts his arm around her.
“And, Mat,” she says, “we belong to each other. After all these years. Doesn’t that mean something?”
It is a long time before he answers. The night has nearly come. He can see only the drifting white blur of Hannah’s blouse under the dark hovering of the tree.
“I don’t know what it means,” he says finally. “I know what it’s worth.”
Chapter 15
THAT’S FINE
Early Monday morning, the thirteenth of August, Ernest is driving up the creek road to work for perhaps the hundredth time. The valley is deep in fog. Since he plunged down into it out of the sunlight on the upland, he has been able to see only a few feet of the road, and he has driven slowly, now and then turning on the wipers to clear the windshield.
The metal bed of the truck is filled with loose tools, odd scraps and remnants, a dozen and a half empty paint buckets. As the truck works its way slowly over the rough road, it is accompanied by a clattering and jarring and rattling absurdly disproportionate to its speed.
Riding in the littered cab in the midst of that commotion, Ernest becomes conscious at a certain point that Ida will have heard him coming by now. And at the thought of her time seems to establish its continuity again from the moment the evening before when as usual he let her out of the truck at the mailbox, and watched her in the mirror until she was out of sight. He imagines Ida hearing the sound of the truck and turning her head toward it a moment, confirming her recognition of it, before going on with her work as before. That is not what he wishes she would do—he wishes that, hearing that sound, she would smile; he wishes that she would put down her work and come out to meet him—but it is what, with a desperate realism, he imagines her doing. The sight and nearness of her still raise in him an insurgence of heat and want. And the most passing thought of her still wakes the dream of household and farm, in which she moves as troubling and elusive as an unborn spirit. But desire and dream are hounded through his mind now by awareness of their futility. The whole structure has begun to be undermined by his understanding that it is licensed only by Ida’s innocence of it and by his failure to bring it to the test of any reality.
But the sense of futility has grown in his mind to the sort of restrained terror that he would feel working without a rope on the incline of a high steep roof. It is the middle of August already, the downward slope of the summer. He has come in sight of the end of his work on the valley farm. And the return to winter work in the enclosure of his shop, which once so strongly appealed to him and which he would look forward to with such a deep presentiment of pleasure, has become unimaginable. He feels himself set loose and at large in the world, freed of all the limits of habit or duty or pleasure that might have held him back, pursuing through the boundlessness of his own fantasy his fleeting, hopeless obsession, pursued by a disaster to which he is blind. Like one of the damned, who with an indomitable loyalty even in Hell suffers only the thought of his irrecoverable sin, Ernest goes back each morning, always one day nearer the last, to his burning.
He drives up onto the bench where the house sits and stops in the yard. After he has turned off the engine, he sits still, listening. At first there seems to be no sound at all. And then he becomes conscious of the trees dripping. That is the only sound. Ida is nowhere in sight. He does not know whether she is at the barn or in the house. He cannot see to the barn. The house looks shut and quiet like a house at night. Now his own silence has begun to hold him. He waits for a sound.
But hearing none, he reaches over and unfastens the glove compartment, takes out a package of cigarettes, and flips the door shut. He lights a cigarette and gets out and goes around to the back of the house. There is an old shed there where he keeps paint and brushes and the few tools he still has a use for.
He is in no hurry. He cannot begin painting until the sun burns through and dries things off. He stands in the door, looking into the shed at the clutter of his stuff, finishing his smoke.
When he is done with it he steps inside. He spends a few minutes rearranging things, collecting his tools where they are scattered on the floor, gathering up the empty buckets and piling them in with the others in the bed of the truck. He carries out a new bucket of paint and sits down in the doorway and opens it. He stirs it carefully, taking his time, watching the pigment rise and blend and smooth out, and then sets the top back on the bucket. He takes his brushes out of the can where they have been soaking overnight and works the turpentine out of them.
He carries his ladder around to the side of the house where the sun will strike first, and sets it up. Taking a putty knife and a wire brush, he climbs the ladder and begins scrubbing away the old paint that has cracked and loosened around an upstairs window. For a good many minutes he works with concentration. As he works down from the top of the window, his eyes come below the level of the half-drawn shade. He leans sideways and looks in.
It is a child’s room—Annie’s room—and the sight of it is a revelation to him. He braces his right hand on the sill and looks closely. The room is neat, the bed prettily made with a patchwork quilt spread over the counterpane. But he can tell, without quite knowing how, that it has not been entered in some time. The door opposite him, that must go into the hall, is shut. The shades of the other two windows are tightly drawn. Only this one is partly raised. He understands, as if by an instinct born of his long preoccupation with her, that though Ida wanted the room closed, needed to have it closed, she could not bear to leave it dark.
What is revealed to him, what dawns on him with a kind of shock as he stands there looking into the room, is Ida’s life, the complexity of it, the uncountable details of its making and being. There are secrecies and intimacies of it that are as forbidden to him, as far beyond his reach, as if he had never known her. The drive of his feelings has so oversimplified her that he has forgot, if he ever allowed himself to know, that there was bound to be such a room, and that it was bound to be closed to him. The recognition seems depthless, and it fills him with a nameless heavy fear. And yet he stands there, cramped and unmoving, looking into the room, caught by the mystery of it.
There is an almost sexual intimacy about looking into that room. And yet his strangeness to it is so strongly proclaimed by everything in it that it is not an intimacy at all but an invasion. And his sense of himself as a stranger is immediately joined to a sense of Gideon’s belonging there. Gideon would know, and his knowing, though he might suffer it like death, would make him free in that room, and in Ida’s life. In that knowing he would be carried toward Ida, toward such a giving and having as Ernest will never know.
He becomes aware that he has heard the yard gate open and shut. Seized by shame and the dread of being caught, he begins scrubbing at the loose paint again, not changing his position at all, bluffing through the pretense that he only leaned over that way in order to do his work. He does not look around. And th
en he can hear footsteps come up near the foot of the ladder and stop. He can feel the nearness of her.
“Don’t fall,” she says.
He does not stop work, and he does not look down at her. “I won’t.”
“Well, you might, leaning over that way.”
“That’s part of it too,” he says. “It takes some stretching and some bending over.”
“I guess it must. I don’t know much about it.”
As he straightens and begins working in a different place, he glances down at her. She is standing within three or four feet of the ladder, a bucket of milk on the ground at her feet. She is wearing a pair of four-buckle overshoes that must belong to Gideon. She is no longer looking up at him, but has turned, and is standing with her back to him, gazing absently out into the fog, which is thinning a little. He can see the yard fence now, rusty wires and spider webs beaded with clear drops. He knows that she has stopped because she gets lonesome and wants somebody to talk to, but he also knows that she will not say anything to him that she would not say to Mat or the Coulters or anybody else who might come to work.
“I like to never found them old cows,” she says.
“Huh!”
“They’d laid down in that fog and I couldn’t see them—of course—but I couldn’t hear them either. Not a sound of a bell.”
“I thought they usually come in by themselves. Didn’t think you had to hunt them.”
“They do. They wasn’t a hundred feet from the barn this morning. I just couldn’t see them or hear them. If that old spotted one hadn’t got up and started her bell to ringing I’d be looking yet.”
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry Page 101